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Kajun's Pub rings in the new year with ninth anniversary celebration

Kajun's Pub on St. Claude

Kajun's Pub on St. Claude Avenue is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Patrons can participate every evening in nightly karaoke, which often carries on until the wee hours of the morning. Tonight, the bar celebrates nine years of operation.

Kajun’s opened its doors on St. Claude Avenue on Dec. 30, 2004, and three months later upped its hours to 24-seven. Since then, the bar has remained open through holidays, hurricanes and all manner of other New Orleans events.

“We never close,” Guidos said.

Late Monday afternoon, on the actual ninth anniversary of Kajun’s, owner JoAnn Guidos sat at the bar with a mellow group of regulars, diving into a thick burger from Verdi Marte with glittery red manicured nails, her attentive yellow dog watching from the floor nearby.

Guidos was born John Guidos in Virginia, but moved to New Orleans when young and transformed full-time into JoAnn as an older adult.

She bought the location for Kajun’s in 1999, kicking off five years of renovation work to buildings that hadn’t even had utilities in several years. Guidos had never before owned a bar, but she had helped build two other bars and spent 10 years working in local bars and restaurants as a video-poker technician.

“I’ve seen successful bars,” she said, and took note of what made them work.

Part of what makes Kajun’s work, according to a bartender: dependability. Customers know the bar is open 24 hours a day and that karaoke starts at 9 p.m. every night, rain or shine, hurricane-force winds or calm. The bar remained open during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with Guidos guarding the door with a shotgun.

Kajun’s added karaoke to its offerings in 2006 or so, beginning with one night a week and gradually increasing to nightly, and now that also continues no matter what, Guidos said.

During Hurricane Isaac in 2012, the bar lost power for a week but never closed — and the karaoke continued as usual, she said.

“It was crazy in here,” Guidos said.

Kajun’s continues to make changes, small improvements here and there, she said. For example, the bar now offers about a dozen beers on draft instead of three, as well as better brands of beer.

“Our top shelf has always been improving,” she added.

A bigger change came during the summer with the opening of Borracho, which serves upscale bar food from 5 p.m. to 4 a.m. daily at Kajun’s.

The bar has also gotten busier during the past nine years, Guidos said.

“Things have just gotten better. We have excellent crowds,” she said.

Kajun’s attracts a diverse crowd, a reflection of the area’s wide range of occupants in terms of age, race, background, sexual orientation and “whatever,” Guidos said.

“It’s a neighborhood bar,” Guidos said. “My philosophy is everybody respects everybody. If you cannot respect anybody, then you’re out of here.

When I asked about her best memories related to Kajun’s, Guidos said, “Just the consistency of being here and partying on and surviving, good times and bad times.”

Later, in an attempt to get some fun karaoke-related stories (more than 70,000 songs are available in the pub’s computerized kiosk), I asked about the most common songs performed by Kajun’s customers.

“Are you crazy?” Guidos replied. “I’m not here for that. “I’m not a night person. I get up early in the morning, I do the day shift,” she continued, taking another bite of her burger. “I’m not a crowd person. I like it old and mellow.”